REFERENCES
- See Jerome S. Bruner, "Freud and the Image of Man", Partisan Review, 23, 340–7, Summer 1956.
- The Monarch of Wit, An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne, 5th ed., 1965; rpt. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966, 176; other critics have suggested that the poem may have been addressed to Lucy, Countess of Bedford.
- Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson, London, 1927; rpt. 1966, 40. Donne's latest biographer, R. C. Bald, concludes that "it is not inconceivable that some such hallucination occurred, and that it was related to Donne's ill-health while he was in Paris. Not only had he suffered prolonged anxiety on behalf of his wife, but he was also for a time feverish and debilitated; such a combination of circumstances might well have combined to bring about the 'vision." (John Donne, A Life, New York, 1970, 252–3).
- M. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, The Origins and Structures of Alchemy, trans. Stephin Corrin,rev. ed., New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1971, 221-6; Jung's alchemical studies are found in vols. 12, 13, and 14 of his collected works, trans. R. F. C. Hull, published by the Bollingen Foundation through the Princeton University Press: Psychology and Alchemy, znd ed., 1968; Alchemical Studies, 1967; and Mysterium Coniunctionis, An Inquiry into Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 2nd ed., 1970. For further comment on Jung's thesis on alchemy, see Gerard Heyin's review in Ambix, 3, 64–7, 1948.
- See Eliade (4), 223–4.
- Ibid., 75.
- See Milton Allan Rugoff, Donne's Imagery, A Study in Creative Sources, 1939; rpt. New York, 1962, 47–63; Edgar Hill Duncan, "Donne s Alchemical Figures", ELH, 9, 257–85, 1942; Joseph A. Mazzeo, "Notes on John Donne's Alchemical Imagery", Isis, 48, 103–23,1957; and Urrnilla Khanna, "Donne's `A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning'—Some possible Alchemical Allusions", N6-Q, 17, 404–5, 1970. Donne's personal library contained several alchemical treatises.
- All quotations of Donne's poetry are from The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shaw. cross, New York, 1967.
- As Eliade (4) explains: "we must not believe that the triumph of experimental science reduced to nought the dreams and ideals of the alchemist. On the contrary, the ideology of the new epoch, crystallized around the myth of infinite progress and boosted by the experimental sciences . . ., takes up and carries forward—despite its radical secularization—the millennary dream of the alchemist" (172). See also Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns, Berkeley, 1972, 160–200.
- See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, London, 1971, 222-31; as Thomas indicates "the essence of the [seventeenth-century scientific and philosophical] revolution was the triumph of the mechanical philosophy. It involved the rejection both of scholastic Aristotelianism and of the Neoplatonic theory which had temporarily threatened to take its place. With the collapse of the microcosm theory went the destruction of the whole intellectual basis of astrology, chiromancy, alchemy, physiognomy, astral magic and their associates. The notion that the universe was subject to immutable natural laws killed the concept of miracles, weakened the belief in the physical efficacy of prayer, and diminished faith in the possibility of direct divine inspiration" (643). In this connection see also Robert Ornstein, "Donne, Montaigne and Natural Law", JEGP, 55, 213–29, 1956.
- As Shawcross (8) notes, "the alchemical and Christian relationships of the word indicate that the dissolution (the death of the loved one) was necessary to transform the base material of the poet into a penitent, resurrected being, hopefully now indestructible" (402).
- Eliade (4), 40.
- Donne asserts that the "cherishing heat" of his mistress' "best lov'd part" is
- Eliade (4), 549.
- According to Eliade, "that cosmic night was compared to death (darkness) as well as to the regression ad uterum is something which emerges both from the history of religious and from the alchemical texts" (157). See also W. A. Murray, "Donne and Paracelsus: An Essay in Interpretation", RES, 25, 115–23; 1949; Allen G. Debus, The English Paracelsians, New York, 1965; Karl-Heinz Weiman, "Paracelsians in der Weltliteratur", Germanische-romanische Montaschraft, Neue Folge 11, 241–74, 1961; and Claudio Gorlier, "II poeta e la nuova alchimia", Paragone, 16, clxxxii, 57–78, clxxxiv, 43–80, 5965.